Audiobook

One of my favorite stories by Edgar A. Poe. It is finely articulate, a shade humorous, and a very even bit of story telling. All this with a horrific ending.
Jane has done a wonderful job, keeping the tenor of the text. Do give a listen.

I originally found this hardback book at a Goodwill store in Santa Fe, famous for having the best collection of junk in town. I’d never read Mary Hunter Austin’s work before and gave this 25 cent hardback a try, (at the time there were no copies online, had I searched). That night, I imediately enjoyed the rare tone to this Western theme and could already imagine it as an audiobook.

“Tom o’ Bedlam” is the name of an anonymous poem in the “mad song” genre, written in the voice of a homeless “Bedlamite.” The poem was probably composed at the beginning of the 17th century; in How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom calls it “the greatest anonymous lyric in the [English] language.”

”‘Why can’t you be like the Happy Prince?’ asked a sensible mother of her little boy who was crying for the moon. ‘The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything.’”

In a town where a lot of poor people suffer and where there are a lot of miseries, a swallow who was left behind after his flock flew off to Egypt for the winter, meets the statue of the late “Happy Prince,” who in reality has never experienced true sorrow, for he lived in a palace where sorrow was not allowed to enter. Viewing various scenes of people suffering in poverty from his tall monument, the Happy Prince asks the swallow to take the ruby from his hilt, the sapphires from his eyes, and the golden leaf covering his body to give to the poor.

”‘It is very singular,’ he continued, ‘that thing about ghosts. People are always asking whether anybody has seen a ghost. I have.’”

Several of [Francis Marion Crawford’s] short stories, such as “The Upper Berth” (1886; written in 1885), “For the Blood Is the Life” (1905, a vampiress tale), “The Dead Smile” (1899), and “The Screaming Skull” (1908), are often-anthologized classics of the horror genre.